Hunt for Jet Switches to Visual Search as Radar Empty

This handout satellite image made available by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority shows a map of the planned search area for missing Malaysian Airline System Bhd.Flight MH370 on March 21, 2014. Source: Australian Maritime Safety Authority via Bloomberg

March 21 (Bloomberg) -- Australian authorities said planes
scouring the southern Indian Ocean for the missing Malaysian
airliner are switching to a visual search of the region after
radar scans came up empty yesterday.

“Although this search area is much smaller than what we
started with, it nonetheless is a big area when you’re looking
out the window and trying to see something by eye,” said John
Young, general manager of emergency response at the Australian
Maritime Safety Authority. “We may have to do this a few times
to be confident about the coverage of this search area.”

Australia, the U.S. and New Zealand resumed their search
today by sending aircraft to search a region 2,500 kilometers
(1,550 miles) southwest of Perth. China is deploying at least
seven ships, including an icebreaker and three naval vessels,
state-run Xinhua News Agency said.

After satellite photographs of objects in the southern
Indian Ocean kindled hopes of a breakthrough yesterday, planes
sent to the area haven’t been able to locate any wreckage. As
the longest search for a passenger jet stretched into its 14th
day, Malaysia’s Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein
said: “This is going to be a long haul.”

Satellite Analysis

Malaysian Airline System Bhd. Flight 370 may have cruised
steadily across the Ocean after diverting from its scheduled
route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, according to an analysis of
satellite pings. It’s the clearest idea yet on how investigators
pinpointed a search zone.

Engineers at Inmarsat Plc, whose satellite picked up the
pings, plotted seven positions for the Boeing Co. 777-200ER on
March 8, Chris McLaughlin, a company spokesman, said in an
interview. The plane flew steadily away from the satellite over
the equator while pinging, McLaughlin said. Malaysia needs to
verify that information, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, the chief of
the nation’s civil aviation, said in Kuala Lumpur.

The data helped investigators conclude that the most
logical path was progressively either north or south. U.S.
investigators have focused the search to the south and Australia
is leading the efforts to scour the southern Indian Ocean for
the jet that vanished March 8 with 239 people on board.

Probable Path

When officials estimated the plane was flying at or near
its cruising speed of more than 500 miles (800 kilometers) an
hour, it produced a probable path the engineers were “very
confident” about, McLaughlin said.

The engineers don’t know the plane’s track for certain
because the satellite pings can only be used to estimate an arc
along the earth’s surface where it would have been, he said.

“You can assume the tracking was based on what the
autopilot was set for on the 777,” he said.

If the Inmarsat estimates are accurate, it would have been
impossible for the plane to have landed before its satellite
transmitter sent the final ping at 8:11 a.m., almost seven hours
after its last known position as it left Malaysian airspace,
according to McLaughlin’s account. Because the 777 burns more
fuel at lower altitude, it also suggests the plane remained at
cruising altitude.

The plane was flying at 542 miles an hour at 35,000 feet
(10,668 meters) at 1:21 a.m. when its transponder stopped
functioning and it disappeared from Malaysian’s civilian radar
system, according to FlightRadar24, a flight-tracking company.

India Search

The engineers at Inmarsat were able to validate their
estimates of the plane’s location by matching its position at
1:07 a.m., when it sent a burst of data through its Aircraft
Communications and Reporting System, McLaughlin said. That final
transmission on Acars included a GPS position that was used to
calibrate the other estimates, he said.

The Inmarsat analysis is consistent with details suggesting
that, at least initially, the path was commanded from the
cockpit, John Cox, president of Washington-based Safety
Operating Systems, said in an interview. It still doesn’t answer
what may have happened to the plane and what led it to fly for
so long, he said.

Planes today resumed the hunt for the missing jet after an
initial foray yesterday failed to find two objects seen in
satellite images. The weather and visibility were poor and
aircraft radar searches made no sightings, said Young. A piece
as big as 24 meters, and a second one as big as 5 meters, were
spotted in images taken March 16.

India meanwhile continued its search, sending two ships
west of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and a P-8I aircraft
southeast toward Sumatra, military spokesman Harmit Singh said
in a text message. India sent another P-8I and a C-130J to Kuala
Lumpur as additional resources for Malaysia, he said.

Not Nice

“It’s about the most inaccessible spot you could imagine
on the face of the earth,” Australian Prime Minister Tony
Abbott said today, referring to the search area southwest of
Perth.

While images of the ocean bottom in the area suggest a flat
plain, there may be features that no one’s mapped yet, she said,
citing a 40-kilometer long undersea canyon less than 200
kilometers off Australia’s north-west coast that wasn’t
discovered until 2010.

“It isn’t known as a nice place to work,” said Anya
Waite, a professor of oceanography at the University of Western
Australia’s Oceans Institute. “It’s not for the faint hearted
to go down there, let alone look for a needle in a haystack. The
winds cycle around the bottom of the world, so it can gather
energy in a way that almost no other ocean does.”